The Creature That Was Once A Man

David Martin cried for hours at his desk, his notes strewn across the hardwood floor. He had been writing for two days straight and his words were now a jumbled mess lying dead on the floor of his study. He hadn't killed those words. They just died. That's how it is sometimes, you think of something, something really brillaint, and that idea is ripped from your bodice of an intellect so quickly that you have no time to finish it. A miscarriage of the mind.

So as David Martin lay, head down, tears streaming down his cheeks, he missed his story. He missed the two hard nights that he had put into the now 100 page fine-point font unfinished manuscript. He missed his fingers cramping as they type on his keyboard the letters that would be transmuted into a sentence, which was part of a paragraph, which was part of a chapter, which would be joined by other chapters until, finally, a book had been made. He had dreamed of writing a book all his life. Ever since he was a child, his notebooks had been filled with half-written prologues or even maybe a few chapters here and there. But now, he had had something. Something major. And he had lost it. He had let go of his true love as she hung over the edge of a cliff. Her body thudding hard against the floor as the pendulum of creativity in David's brain ceased.

David raised his eyes from the inside of his arms. They were glistening with tears. His nose was running. He was a mess. But that didn't bother him. He didn't care if he was a mess for the entire world to see. He didn't care if his parents would walk in and see their twenty-seven year old son, the very son that had moved to New York right out of highschool and found a job waiting tables at a boujee pizza joint for near minimum wage, the very son that they had put fifteen thousand dollars into in hopes that he wouldn't wind up on the side of the road with a sign that said "please spare a few dollars: I'm hungry", the very son that they had bought a typewriter for, as he had requested; he didn't care if they came in and he was a mangy, scabbed, flea-infested mutt. What he cared about now was his book.

He got up from his desk, his old-school typewriter laying coldly on his desk, his papers still on the cool hardwood flooring of his bottom-floor apartment on Sullivan Street, across from Kho Phung Asian Cuisine. The papers seemed to beckon him closer so that they could depart from this world of imagination with the final words "Why didn't you finish me?"

David knelt down and collected himself. He had thrown his heart across the room with these papers and as he stretched out his arm to take hold of the stack of mimeo long-grain sheet-papers, he felt that he was reclaiming a cold and lifeless organ, that had once been part of him and now remained alien to his flesh. He imagined what it was like for somebody to see their heart ripped out of their flesh right in front of their very eyes. He imagined what it was like if it was still beating, still throbbing with the pain of blood deficit. That is what he imagined he was feeling right now.

He let out a moan now. As he squeezed the lifeless remains of his beloved story manuscript, he felt his own body get squeezed. He felt the long fingers of anxiety and depression creeping over his shoulders to embrace him.

His tears were gone now, just memories foreign to his cheeks, and he was still screaming his loud moan. He was being stabbed over and over again through his mind. He had given everything he had into writing something and at last he had lost it. He had lost the fifteen thousand dollars his parents gave him; he had lost the job that he had promised would keep him afloat; he had lost the sanity that he promised himself would remain staid and stolid.

The air in the room was now stagnant and dry. He had stopped moaning.

His trash can, overflowing with limbs of stories, sat there and watched David as he groveled on the floor of his study. His roommate was not home but would be home any minute. He would walk in and see David on the ground, clutching something close to his chest. David was in a catatonic state of the mind, all of his functions had shut down except his very animalistic instincts. He knew that somehow he had been wronged. Whether it was from the universe or himself or his parents or his roommate or whomever: he had been screwed over. He was angry now. His aching fingers, still clutching the dead story, tightened; his jaw grew tense and his teeth began to grind. His eyebrows furrowed into a depressed state. There was going to be havoc. Getting up from his position on the ground, David flung the rough unstapled stack of papers across the room and marched over to the door of his study. The papers hit the trash can and sent all of the gore from his writing career all over his study. His desk was filled with the guts of his victims. He had birthed these things and he had ultimately killed them. It wasn't his fault that they died. Some people can't help but be born butchers.

His legs pounding on the hardwood floor of his apartment, he stomped over to the door of his study, the many bookshelves that lined his walls shook in fear fo what might happen to them. He had been able to kill his own stories, so might he be able to kill other people's stories? Maybe.

The door swung open, pounding against the wall. David's neighbors on all sides probably heard that. In fact, they most definitely did. His upstairs neighbor was Mr. Katchkadorian, an old man with an acute curiosity in the lives of anybody he can see, and his two ground floor neighbors were couples, one a married couple trying for a baby and the other a not-yet-married couple also trying for a baby. They were all alert for something they could talk to their landlord about.

David charged from his room, his arms flinging from their sides with a fatality that knocked over the favorite urn of his roommate, William, as well as the picture frame of David and his parents on their first camping trip when David was five. He hadn't noticed either of the items falling and shattering on the ground. Exposed from his lair of rage, David worked his way through the apartment, attacking the furniture as well as the walls. The claws that had now formed from David's fingers from a few weeks of neglectful grooming dug into the wallpaper and scratched the prized leather sofa that David had brought with him from his home in Oklahoma. "I'm taking the couch by the way," he had told his parents, and they didn't seem too upset at that. They laughed it off later anyway. But none of that was going through David's mind. Instead, David was still not thinking. He was an animal that had lost any of his humanity in that one loud and heartbreaking moan he had let out as he clutched his beloved's body.

The kitchen and the living room, being worked over thoroughly by the beastly wreck of a past human being, was in disarray, raped and pillaged. Except, that thing that was once called David was pillaging for money or food, it was pillaging because of pure rage. It had to have an outlet.

The creature moved to the bedrooms, flipping the beds and shattering the mirrors and destroying the PCs that both of them used extensively. The apartment with the hardwood flooring that had once been organized and peaceful, was now defiled and chaotic.

A noise at the front door.

The monster grabbed a baseball bat that had once belonged to an aspiring writer. The jiggling of the key in the lock of the front door seemed to knock any form of caution from the pedastool of the creatures mind.

The door opened: the creature charged.